DICK SUGG. I teach movies, literature, and Humanities courses at Florida International University in Miami, and have since 1977. Reading Bill’s account of how he first came to the movies, I remembered my own origins. I can’t determine its significance, but I’d like to note for the record a very early exposure to “art movies,” in 1962 or so, when I was hired as a tuxedo-wearing usher at the Apollo theater in St. Louis, my hometown. There, for example, I saw, between usher duties, parts of Last Year at Marienbad on thirty three consecutive nights. It played to small audiences after the first week, but the theater owner, Mrs. Piccione, loved it, and so it stayed. Also, I got my dear sister Carolyn on the payroll as candy girl.  Exotic movies, free candy, and steady paychecks made for a lasting positive impression--the tuxedo not withstanding.

        I met Bill in 1967-68, when he first came from U. Va. To Florida; I was the first to write a dissertation under Bill’s direction, and I remember well how our relationship grew from, first, our weekly meetings over coffee at the Crystal to what I had written, to nights out at the Windjammer or Red Lion drinking beer and talking, often with his wife Mina in attendance; soon other students writing for Bill--Frank Burke, Annie Fry, Franny Fevrier, Ellen Ashdown--began to get together and talk about Bill and his ideas on movies and literature. At that time it seemed to us that Bill was a fountain of new approaches to what interested us,  and the advocate for a deeper theoretical, philosophical explanation than our other professors, who were by and large New Criticism practitioners, and original thinkers only within New Critical parameters.  And, of course, that was only the beginning of the Bill Boom in Gainesville, since I left in 1970; I do believe it is true that Bill must have directed more dissertations and theses than any of the other professors in the English department from 1969 into the 80's.
            One thing that was interesting about Bill was that he was all the great things he was for his graduate students while still being a man with a dynamic family life--four kids, a dog, big house, summer vacations camping, a wife who came to the Red Lion and drank beer with him and his graduate students. No doubt other professors had passionate family lives, but they never shared them with us twenty-something students the way Bill did. Looking back, I think that was a powerful, if subconscious, positive model for his single-but-looking or living-together-but-uncertain graduate students. Somehow it made it seem that the life of the mind and life lived in real time weren’t as far apart as they sometimes seemed at English department social events. Maybe that model was the best gift Bill gave us.